Since there’s a ‘best of’ thread going on this, why not a worst of?
My three choices are…
Kangaroo
Burger Time
that one where you’re a caveman and you have to avoid the boulders, swing from a bunch of vies and jump over the natives with the spears. What was that one called? A really stoopid game.
That was either Jungle King or Jungle Hunt, depending on the version you played. And it wasn’t a caveman…it was Tarzan!
Which explains why Taito, when faced with a C&D letter, decided to change Tarzan to a pith-helmet equipped explorer-type, and reissue the game under the name Jungle Hunt.
Anyone remember the Frogger song that came out? There was a very brief rash of video game related pop songs in the '80s. I’m fairly certain that there was a Pac Man one. The only thing I remember about the Frogger song was some schmuck wailing “Go, Froggy, Go!”
While I played it quite a bit, Asteroids was pretty bad. The secret was to never move, just spin and shoot the asteroids. Dull, dull, dull.
Gah, the worst game ever was Dragons Lair. Perhaps I was too young, but I really tried to play this game, hundreds of times. I never made it more than 30 seconds.
I opened this thread just to say “E.T. for the 2600”, knowing full well that someone had already said “E.T. for the Atari 2600”. That game traumatized me at the tender age of four. Terrible, terrible, terrible game.
Dragon’s Lair and the similar games from the 80’s all sucked ass. You didn’t really play them quite so much as you tried to figure out and memorize which senseless motions of the joystick would cause the cartoon to keep playing. One of my friends referred to them as “BF Skinner games.”
What were you guys smoking? There were lots of games worse than that!
My personal nadir is Space Zap, a totally pointless button masher.
You have a space fortress. It has four laser cannons that point up, down, left, and right. You have four buttons that pick which cannon is active. Hitting the fire button shoots a beam straight out of the active cannon – there’s no way to aim. Things come at you. You pound the buttons mindlessly. Then you die. Stunningly craptacular.
I also remember Gun Fight being pretty sub-par. Brain dead gameplay and really sluggish controls. Of course, it was made in 1975 so maybe it doesn’t count … .
I had that game when I was a kid. I loved it because it was the only game I could win (which, of course, is because I was so bad at video games—still am).
I just got a PS2 selection of games, and there are a couple that I never saw or heard of until now. One’s called Satan’s Hollow, really bad Space Invaders clone, some other one is called Bubbles, or Sink or something like that. You’re a bubble in a sink trying to clean stuff up? What’s up with that?
Even though I’ve never seen them in an arcade, and I worked in one, those have to be the worst.